Much has been told about the global climate change during the last several decades. The humanity consumed too much, exploited the invaluable natural resources not giving anything in return. While the significant amount of researchers, the world leaders, and their supporters emphasize the importance of more active actions, the vast majority of people prefer to stay aside of the environmental problems. But the truth is that there is no more time left to be careless and indifferent.
As it can be seen from The 11th Hour documentary, the global warming, and air pollution are the most crucial commonly perceived problems. The global warming caused mainly by the increased level of carbon dioxide emissions, that gather in the atmosphere and make the Earth surface hotter, the glaciers melting and the air poisoned. The precipitation level decreases and that makes the soil dry and fruitless. That causes harm to agricultural, marine and the livestock production systems. Combined with the pesticides and other seemingly useful chemicals, this may be the deadliest attack on the soil. The animal populations adjusted to particular temperature regime either will disappear from their natural habitats or will just become extinct. This issue endangers both the wild nature, human-created world and the human himself.
While watching The 11th Hour, one’s attention can be driven to another serious problem of the modern globalized society, overconsumption. As Cowie notes, “The overconsumption comes about to competition up to and beyond the sustainability limit”. In the modern world the volume of consumption of goods in the developed countries exceeds such level in the developing ones more than 30 times; the greatest part of the resources is available only for the developed nations. Moreover, the enormous profits gained by the multinational companies often cause much harm to the third world countries, as the rich ones prefer to transfer their environment harmful energy-excessive production outside their territories. Many times, during the film, Leonardo DiCaprio insists that we should abstain from consuming and producing too much and change our attitudes towards the limited resources.
The issue of overpopulation is another striking one. Today it is hard to imagine that in the early 60-ies of the last century, the world population was two times less than it is now. It is even harder to believe that there were less than one billion people at the beginning of the 20th century. During the last 150 thousand years, the Earth population never reached the billion marks. And in just 130 years this number has grown seven times. All this enormous amount of people has extremely unequal access to resources.
The overall situation with the pollution in the Earth’s 11th hour might look grave, but there still are chances for the humankind to find the way out. The alternative renewable sources of energy could help to renew and maintain the sustainability of the world ecosystems. Among those sources are water, sunlight, wind, biomass energy. The only contradictory point here is the price of alternative energy facilities; they might be unaffordable for the poor countries. All things considered; it can be stated that it’s high time for the humanity to unite. Only mutual efforts and equal international cooperation will help the new generation to diminish the dreadful legacy of the past and make the planet prosperous. It’s high time for the people to “Turn mankind’s darkest hour into its finest”.